Word: fatherness
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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This book, laid in Ireland at the start of World War II, tells of a 17-year-old. Everylad who feels himself a failure and is at odds with his father and siblings. The work possesses authenticity and humor; the writing is literate and well above average. The weaker portions are overshadowed by the tremendous impact of the final pages, where the boy finds a meaning for his life as he works to help victims of a German bombing-raid...
Until the substandard chase and rescue, the gagwriters resort to Edsel/Agnew jokes and mad bolsheviks. The junior ambassador tries to make clumsiness funny, bumping into chairs and stammering in search of laughs. The cause of his trouble, he claims, was having a famous ambassador for a father. Whenever Junior misbehaved, Mom hit him with an issue of TIME with Dad on the cover. Viewers are free to make similar use of this copy on the makers of the movie...
...articulate." In hopes of doing better, John Lahr, his son and biographer, has endeavored to display the man by somewhat disjointedly laying out the surface facets of his personality, much as a dresser might have laid out Lahr's costume changes. In dealing with his father young Lahr, who is a drama critic (Evergreen Review), manages to seem both revealingly intimate and inconclusive in his analysis, suggesting that the real man was unknowable or perhaps not there...
Bomarzo's Orsini combines Gothic deformity with a beautiful, refined face and a graceful pair of Tintoretto hands. Yet it is Orsini's genetic baggage, "the rucksack of my misfortune," that shapes his soul. In his childhood, the hump fostered his father's disdain and his brother's malice. When he was a youth, it caused impotence and self-disgust as Orsini had to view it multiplied in a harlot's mirrored chamber...
This chronicle is often retrieved from corniness by touching moments and memories that allow young Lahr to mold humanity around the trite-tragic skeleton that his father's life seems to have been. For instance, there is Lahr as a budding vaudevillian putting makeup on his collar even when unemployed so everyone will know he is in show biz. One is touched by the physical fact that his left wrist was permanently larger than the right from breaking repeated pratfalls. And a fine moment comes when a wino outside the theater holds out a dollar saying "Here, Bert...